KDE has released a first release candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute bugs and completing translations and documentation.

There are several bugs athttps://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=panel+resizing
Only 2 have votes:
- Bug 226848 - Resizing maximized windows horinzontally is broken if an upper panel exists (40 votes)
- Bug 276130 - information panel has wrong contents size proportion in resizing (20 votes)
Which panel resizing problem are you referring to? Did you vote for any of the bugs? Have you found or reported bugs that are not listed in the bugs.kde.org search above?

Regarding Strigi...
If this warning bothers you, what have you done to address the issue? In response to comments you've made elsewhere on dot.kde.org, this question does not mean that you should shut up or fix it yourself. Hoping is not an effective strategy for getting something done.

There is 1 bug/enhancement request that seems to relate to your description:https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=223294
Is this what you are referring to? Only one non-developer is following this bug, which has zero votes.

Hardly arbitrary, Aaron explained why: some bugs had been fixed for 4.7 that may have solved this problem too and the report itself was too cluttered with pointless comments to be useful anymore. He also explained what to do next: if someone tests it with 4.7 and finds the bug is still there then open a fresh bug report clearly stating what problem(s) still remain and then don't clutter it up with whining and moaning.

But how would he know, there's so much noise on that report it's hard to know anymore what one single topic it's supposed to be about. We have thousands of bugs to try keep track of, messy ones like that don't make it any easier. He clearly set out what to do, is it too much to ask the reporter to help keep track of things instead of overloading a single point of failure?

Here's an idea, instead of spending your time uselessly trolling the Dot, how about helping out with bug triaging and start learning how to fix them instead?

Odysseus wrote:
"...instead of spending your time uselessly trolling the Dot, how about helping out with bug triaging and start learning how to fix them instead?"

Yeah, there is a little acid in the full remark. And perhaps "and" would work better as "or". However, some of the remarks are troll-ish...provoking and disruptive to useful discourse. There are many other things that people could contribute rather wasting time on trolling. Given the subject matter of this thread, this might be a place where people could start...http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad. Other opportunities are described at...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Contribute.

It's ironic and amusing that people are getting some of the best software in the world and complaining that their itch is not getting scratched...arguing and commenting disrespectfully to people who are creating and fixing that software.

KDE is a community. It operates better than any other community I know of. And it operates from particular design principles (http://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct/)...
Be considerate
Be respectful
Be collaborative
Be pragmatic
Support others in the community
Get support from others in the community

Reading through the comments on the bug thread, it's clear that some people are in the KDE neighborhood, but not the community.

Another way to get your "important" pet bug fixed when the developers have different priorities than you, are to simply hire someone to fix it for you(or since the user in question obviously pay for their distribution, convince them to fix it). No need to learn anything about development, just find a local developer to do the job. Small independent 1-5 man consulting shops are everywhere, so it should not be hard to find someone willing and able to do the job.

It may cost something in the range of $100-$300/h, but since the bug is such an important show-stopper that should not matter.

And that value is the same the KDE developers continue to give us for free with every hour they spend writing code and working with bugzilla(or wasting on noise, like in this case). Wasting developers time, insult them and demand them to fix, as in this case, minor issues are incredibly ungrateful and rude.

There is no point in starting every (pre-) release announcement with a "fix my bugs now" posting.

I also encounter some (small) bugs, however

I can live with them / workaround them for the time being (my experience so far is that my bugs will get fixed, but it may take some time)

there are many bugs that annoy me in the Windows world (work/office) and there is nothing I can do about it

even if I knew that my bugs would get fixed faster if I annoy the developer / community I would not do it, as (i) it will demotivate the developer (ii) hurt KDE in the long term.

How would I feel if I spend my time on a free software project and get emails blaming me for not closing bug xyz?(*) I accept that I live in a free software world where developers decide which bugs they are going to work on (not a perfect world, but better than others). And I try to send at least one email to one of the KDE developers per year and send them a big THANK YOU for all the great work they have done! Hopefully, this compensates for some of the frustration they encounter...

---
(*) this is not so much about trixl's posting, however I have seen many postings / comments on bug reports where developers were blamed

please understand that for many users there is no big point anyway in shooting pre-releases one after each other, all with the same bugs as the older versions.

Right or not, users gets very nervous, very fast when developers seem more interested in "new features" than in "less bugs".
It's something like a simple fact of life...

Think about this: people don't get nervous about what they don't care, and having a userbase that cares can be the best resource for the community.

And then there's the "live up to expectations" factor. I've read here announces and comments full of: "the best software in the world", "new wonderful technologies", "social-semantic revolution"... if someone buy all this and find himself troubled by the same, old, trivial bugs, he can easily get angry. No surprise.

Being just a bit more prudent and a bit less boastful would help KDE community very much...

Ok, so a big THANK YOU to KDE developers is due. But, please, try to remember that behind every pending bug there is a frustrated user.

There is a point in reporting bugs. That's some of the value that users provide. However, there is no point in harping on a particular bug...trying to make something a squeaky wheel that needs to be greased is not working. It is not likely to start working.

There is nothing arbitrary about how this bug was treated. Several people (ASeigo in the main) explained clearly why the bug was being marked invalid. This does not mean that the bug doesn't exist, nor does it mean that no one is working on it. Unfortunately, both of these conclusions were drawn in the thread.

This bug report being labeled "invalid" could legitimately mean that--to developers--the report has lost its usefulness. Rather than arbitrarily blowing off the bug, a developer writes:
"...my recommendation is to wait for 4.7 to come out and test against that; i'm fairly confident that at least some of the issues reported here have been resolved."

Apparently that is not acceptable to the commenters who smell the chum, and continue with the remarks that I find mildly disrespectful.

Why critical comments are scored negatively and silly condescending ones are scored positively? And more worrying: who has the "power" to score comments and why?
I can't see any "thing" to vote comments; is it some feature reserved to registered users or are the site admins the ones who can do it? (if so they aren't administrators but pure censors. I hope to be wrong)

Logged-in users are allowed to express their opinions of comments with scoring. Anyone is free to express an opinion; shouldn't readers be able to reply in like fashion?

In this system, admins could simply delete any comments that are not sweetness and light. However, if critical comments were just deleted, we would miss such literary gems as "silly condescending ones". Priceless.

Why critical comments are scored negatively and silly condescending ones are scored positively? And more worrying: who has the "power" to score comments and why?
I can't see any "thing" to vote comments; is it some feature reserved to registered users or are the site admins the ones who can do it? (if so they aren't administrators but pure censors. I hope to be wrong)

I am testing and reporting bugs for 4.7 since the branch was opened and it is going to rock. Like did 4.6, and 4.5, and 4.4 …
Keep up the nice work! :)
And it’s nice to see patches you made yourself have finally gotten spread to a wide audience.

Things I really like in 4.7:
* The new shadow system is awesome. Tooltips and menus look so nice, KDE typical shiny.
* Dolphin’s new sleak appearance is definitly a plus
* KDE Pim 2 is just awesome
* Akonadi error messages aren’t annoying anymore
* further polish of course

Things I really really hate:
* I will rant about this forever! WHY the hell did you remove the back button from kickoff? God, WHY?!

>Things I really really hate:
>* I will rant about this forever! WHY the hell did you remove the back button from kickoff? God, WHY?!

It's simple, developers they are konsole freaks, maybe they feel that they are smarter just because they can remember a few applications' binary names; so alt+f2 and their appname will get what they want.

Only stupid users like you and me would use menu to navigate. And because they don't use what they develop, they are not bothered to make things easier; now that the top bread-crumb looks nice but developers did not bother to test it's usability and they don't know that it is difficult to use because of too much mouse movement. Who can make them understand the ease of use was with vertical-back-button of kickoff when they never use the kickoff menu!!!

Remember users are 2nd class citizens in KDE. That's why KDE has not become a users' desktop but a developers' desktop. And voting at bugs.kde.org is a joke.

To say that the plasma developers need help is an understatement, they seriously need help.

KDE4 is now soon at 4.7 and I'm still using 3.5.10 due to all the bugs and nonsense (plasma, nepomuk) in KDE4. It's as simple as KDE3 _working_, and working _well_ on _all_ my systems, including EeePC 901 - it's fast and responsive. KDE4 OTOH is annoyingly resource consuming and crawls even on my fastest system (quad Xeon 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM). And if that wasn't bad enough, the usability is really piss poor as well.

I'm not trying to troll here, I'm just saying what I see and how I experience it. I really had high hopes for KDE4 to be utterly cool, but have instead been utterly disappointed with it, they're basically bringing it in the opposite direction of what I had hoped. And with that vanished the last hope for a really cool desktop on un*x.

Example of how it sucks... to use music productivity software, I simply _have_ to change to something else than KDE4 - plasma constantly pulls between 60% and 90% CPU, in a stupid, everlasting clock_gettime event poll loop. Yes, the plasma developers need help!

I have 4.7 Beta 1 installed, but lately I've been using mostly LXDE (openSUSE 11.3) so I don't know about plasma. But I can say that even here I've experienced knotify eating away my processor more than once.

My machine is far behind these specs "quad Xeon 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM". It is speedy running 4.6.4. A few things have helped with that--most notably changing OpenGL to XRender in System Settings, due to lack of support for Intel GM965.

I'm far from being as tech savvy as others here. But working with the various forums appropriate to this distro, and learning--via readily available web resources--what might be causing difficulties, I've got a system that works great.

4.6.4 running on some duo core laptop with 4G and also on an Aspire netbook, both work great.

What steps have you taken to solve the problems you're having? Any forum posts? Local LUG?

KDE4 has completely lived up to my expectations. Can't imagine using any other desktop. Not only that, when I run the netbook at the local coffeeshop, nearly every time, someone wants to know "what is that?" I've loaded KDE 4 on 3 newbie computers by now, and they love it. Yes there are a few glitches from time to time, but nothing like what they were having with other mainstream OSs.

Couldn't be happier with an OS.

UPDATE: Just did Windows and other Updates on my wife's Win7 machine. Dreadful.

It's good that your experiences are positive, and I think some people still need to recognise that not everyone sees dreadful performance with KDE 4.x - I don't, on four different machines of varying age and capability, FWIW.

On the other hand I don't think it necessarily takes away from the negative experiences some people still seem to have with KDE. Still, my bet is that most of these problems are graphics driver related. In any case the best way to get these problems solved is if the people having these problems can try to work constructively with the developers. How can this work? Perhaps start with the following:

User: tell me what I need to do / what information I need to provide you with in order to fix this problem.

Developer: ok, you need to do this, this, and this, and send me the results.

Both kickoffs search function and the run tool search by more than just name. If you typed in paint looking for a program to paint with for example it would find Krita and mypaint. If I typed in word it would find the libreOffice word processer component. Both also search recent documents so you can just type in the name of the last file you were working on.

I am not exactly sure what your beef is with the breadcrumbs (unless you didn't realise that you can switch to the old representation by double clicking on the address).

The problem with the vertical button in the kickoff menu is the discoverability of it. If you go back and look at the complaints about this when 4.0 was released. Of course people are used to it now...

Actually not; if I type "word processor" I get LibreOffice Writer, so, it's a lot more intuitive than what you think. The biggest omission isn't the button (the breadcrumb can fully replace it), but the total lack of keyboard navigation where the breadcrumb is used (navigating with the keyboard in the "Computer", "Recent Files" and "Exit", where no breadcrumb is used, work; navigating with the keyboard in the "Favourites" or "Applications" panes doesn't work). The sad reality is: KDE is useless without a mouse.

I filed bugs regarding keyboard interaction, but they have been unnoticed or ignored. A full review of how KDE interacts with the keyboard is required, there are simply too many inconsistencies.

The problem there is that clearly few developers are interested in Kickoff and only the basic maintenance is done... With things like these you're simply depending on someone sending in a patch which will surely be reviewed and integrated.

Nobody ever uses multihead, i.e. having mutiple X servers.
Yes I know (or I assumed) that it will work on mutlihead (that’s what the patches in ksplashx are about) but they broke the multiscreen stuff and multiscreen is what 99% of people have. So, this is a major regression for some stupid stuff that will eventually die anyway (Wayland \m/)

Correct me if I am wrong but on linux there is 2 way to have more than one screen attached. There is Xrender witch only work on 1 card and there is separated x.

I have 2 cards to power my 4 screens so that renders Xrender usless. And separated x has never worked proper with kde 4 (but there is still small progess with each release).

About Wayland I think it is at least 6-8 years before it will be usefull (eg before KDE, drives (moth opensource and closed source) will support it nicely). Which is around the time where I should give up my free (free as ion beer,not speach) windows 7. I just hoped that I could return to KDE before that time

About the removal of the back button in kickoff. Looks like this will a sore spot for some folks and seen as an improvement by many more? Or is it more half and half? Oh. wait...this a pre-release and hasn't been kicked out on the street yet. ;)

Okay, all kidding aside, this is obviously one of those strictly subjective things and personally, I like the change to a bread crumb style navigation although the font could be a bit larger or at least a bit darker but that might be theme related (I'm running 4.7(pre) on Chakra Edn milestone 1). We all have our pet peeves and one of mine concerning the kickoff style menu was that awkward back "bar" on the left hand side of the menu. But that's just my opinion, you know?

I want my back button back :(
It was a nice, big, easy to hit target in a consistent location ... now what I have to click on is tiny, medium contrast text in an out of the way place - that is - I have to move the mouse all the way to the top just to able to go back! Completely destroys the flow of it IMO. At least throw it back in as an option ... pretty please?

It is the the Number 1 desktop in the world hands down. Thanks KDE team. My family and most all my friends use this desktop. And some of us have just started learning how we can report bugs to give back. Wish had money to donate but thats not the case with us. But you guys are appriated to no end here.

Why isn't there any builds from the OS guys like kubuntu, opensuse etc. Apart from unstable repositories which bring in a whole bunch of other software, couldn't find another repo. Hopefully someone releases soon.

Usually these packages are added along the way but you can count on openSUSE having them within a few days as it builds all of KDE Trunk at least once a week and semi-stable packages are available for all openSUSE versions (11.2-11.3-11.4-tumbleweed-factory).

1. A long time ago, with KDE 4.4, an idle CPU usage of 2% with effects, without blur, was achieved, and I was happy. KDE 4.5 introduced blur, but it was unbearably slow with my poor GeForce 6150. KDE 4.6 improved somewhat the situation, but I was still idling at more than 20%. Now KDE 4.7 idles at 2% WITH BLUR. Thanks, KWin sorcerers, you made me really happy.

2. There is a mega-bug with Strigi, again. Nepomuk reindexes everything all the time and the CPU usage rises to 99% unless I disable Strigi. But, this time, two things are different: 1) developers are working overtime to kill this bug once and for all, and 2) last time, it was an eaten core. Now it's each core running at 45%. Strigi can paralellize work, and it will perform better with multicore CPUs. This bug is going to be killed soon.

3. Clock. It SIMPLY LOOKS AND BEHAVES AWESOMELY.

4. Shadows. They look great, and, if you place your panel on top, you'll see the shadow obscuring your titlebar nicely, like it should be. Great. What's not so great is that the Plasma Air theme backgrounds are 4.6's, so, even if Plasma can render shadows properly, the Air theme still has SVG shadows drawn inline and I still see plasmoids snapping to their shadows, instead of snapping to their borders. Can you fix that? Now that the real fixes are in place, it's a matter of removing some SVG shadows, setting some flags so Plasma keeps in charge, and voilà.

5. Oxygen. It has evolved nicely, except for the folder icon. I still like the old one better. Nuno, I love your work, but your new folder icon is a mistake in itself.

6. KDE Microblog. It can do full retweets and mark some tweets as favorites, but it still can't retrieve more than 16 tweets at once. Please, can somebody lift this limit?